This is part of an ongoing startup advice series where I answer (anonymized!) questions from readers, like a written version of Smart Bear Live. To get your question answered, email me at asmartbear -at- shortmail -dot- com.

Ambitious Sailor writes:

How can a former navy officer with twelve solid years of overseas defense contracting experience convince a tech startup to hire him as their business guy?

I’m currently talking to [CEO] at [hot new tech company] and I have an interview coming up.

I have a love of entrepreneurship and I figured I may be able to learn a few things from smarter people than myself.

Replace your question with “why” instead of “how:”

Why should a former navy officer with overseas defense contracting experience be “the business guy” at a startup? Especially a hot tech startup?

My guess is, if you’re honest, the fact is that there is no particular reason you should be the CEO of that company. Which is why you’re asking me how to convince them otherwise.

But that’s not to say you shouldn’t be! There or somewhere. The question is not “how to convince,” the challenge is this:

Define the startup in which you would be the perfect person to be CEO or Biz Dev. Not just “OK,” not just “no reason why you couldn’t,” but perfect. No one one Earth better. Construct one startup like that — an imaginary startup.

Who would the founders be? (Probably technical with no sales or business experience, so they need someone for that role.)

What industry would it be? (Probably defense, a place where you have to “know someone” and “know how the game is played” to participate at all, where the founders aren’t those people, so they’re dead unless someone like you runs sales.)

What type of product would it be? Technical? Administrative? Mission-critical? Think hard — a startup doing something mission critical is a hard sell. What kind of product could you sell with your eyes closed

Where is the startup? (e.g. maybe it’s not near Washington, but washington is where everything goes down and you don’t mind being there, so they need you there.)

Keep going, what else? You don’t mind travel; what kind of biz dev or sales requires overseas travel that you can do cold but the founders would be bewildered?

Of course I’m ignorant of this whole industry so it’s quite likely I’m not even in the right ballpark with any of those ideas. But the mindset is right.

Now, does the startup you find have to match exactly on every point? No. But now you know what you’re looking for.

And, once you find it, you’ll get the job. If not, they’re the crazy ones.

Add your advice to the discussion section!

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Now, for some mandatory hello world program. Nah. The code below simply prints the arguments to your Scala program.

var i = 0
while (i < args.length) {
  println("hello " + args(i) + "!")
  i += 1
}

// Assuming you have saved the code in hello.scala, do the following to run the code:
// scala hello.scala arg1 arg2 arg3

The code above is an imperative style used normally in languages like C or C++. Most new programmers are exposed to this style.

Being a Ruby developer, I quickly wondered if there is something similar to “.each” method? Yes, there is.

args.foreach(arg => println(arg))
args.foreach(println)

Above is a functional style and is something you will be comfortable with as you improve your programming skill. In Scala, the second line is possible if the function accepts a single argument.

Since ‘println’ is just a function, you could just replace it with your own function.

def printer(x: String) = {
  println(x.toUpperCase)
}

args.foreach(arg => printer(arg))

Yes, you guessed right. You can also define anonymous function.

args.foreach(arg => { println(arg.toUpperCase) })

When I first heard that Scala is somewhat related to Java, my first thought was it is going to be another verbose language. Well, I was wrong It appears to be a fun and powerful language worth learning.

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Instead of publishing all the lovely stuff people said - and thanks! - I wanted to take Jason Cohen's talk on honesty to heart and here is everything. We think we did pretty well, but we can do better and every year we will try. The main feedback that we want to act on this year is around food and content.

Quite a few people said they felt the food wasn't as good last year as in the previous year. We agree. Despite having the same supplier and a bigger budget, the breakfast wasn't as good as we expected. (Though we note that the spaceperson icecream was a hit, as was the noodle box lunch on the last day). This year, we have upgraded the venue and you should see some differences.

Not every business is a SaaS business. We know! A lot of the talks at BoS are about the human and cultural aspects of growing a world class business and the lessons from a lot of the talks should be applicable across lots of types of business. We want our speakers to represent a wider SaaS, Web, Enterprise Software, and mobile sectors from both consumer and B2B. We think that bringing great people in these communities together to share ideas is one of the most powerful things BoS can do.

Here is the full feedback from BoS 2011 delegates...

• “Excellent opportunity to sit back, away from day to day operations, and share the experiences of others & reflect on those.”
• “An essential conference for anyone or company, waiting to be or is already in the business of software.”
• “I was thoroughly and pleasantly surprised by the cooperative spirit and overall helpful nature of the delegates I met, toward a little 2-person basement-based company who sells their software for $7.50 CAD.  And the scope of attendees - ven-cap funded to bookstrapped, hundreds of employees to 1-man shows, windows and web apps... everything!”
• “It was an enlightening good time!”
• “Another awesome year at BOS. It's like an annual shot in the arm to get me super energized about my industry”
• “Inspirational,  would like to see more nuts and bolts for non store front, higher price sales.”
• “The conference was inspirational. I can't wait to get back and start implementing what I have learned - and it's a lot.”
• “Awesome conference.  Will be back next year.  Please don't let it grow too big....small is what keeps it cool!”
• “Awesomeness OD!”
• “Everyday we had actionable ideas that we can apply almost instantly to our business”
• “The event succeeded my expectations. The energy and good vibe from the presenters blew me away and we are really looking into adapting new practices we learnt.”
• “Please include vegetarian meal options next year.”

• I really like Kindle app. It’s hassle free. I can get samples to ipod or ipad or to my computer and sync between devices. I can buy stuff for ipad, read it in ipod and check library in PC. It’s just super cool.
• Kindle app user interface is good. Has everything I need and more.
• I don’t need night lamp anymore. Ipod touch is great device with proper backlight, so night time I read my kindle books using this tiny device. It’s convenient.
• The catalogue is huge: I can get the book I want in 76% of the cases. I do wish people would transform their old books to kindle formats, and have sent authors info on this. Maybe one day I get 100% of the books via kindle store.
• Ok prices. Sure, the prices could be always lower than paperback versions, which is bit like slapping my face… but I don’t complain. It’s not that big price difference anyway. Convenience is what matters me most.
• My bookshelf is always with me, even when I’m offline. (As long as I have battery left…)
• My digital book library takes heckofa less space than my physical lib.
• I don’t know if there’s DRM. For once, I’m happy to be a customer who can buy stuff without hassling with visible DRM. For example, if Amazon goes down (it doesn’t, just stating an example), I can still access my books. If my network connection goes down, I can access my books.

I simply don’t have any reason not to buy physical books (except for Terry Pratchett, since there’s no kindle digital Finnish version available – and for the fact that the hardcover versions look good on my house, they are decoration too) and thus I’m buying only Kindle books.

They have made pretty close to everything right (small thing with the book prices that should be lower for digital versions compared to physical and second minor thing is that I’d like to fetch & download book samples via kindle app), and totally got my money.

Also, I’ve spent more money on books than ever before (I’ve been a regular book buyer always), for your information. That means not only they get all the money I spend in books… but they’ve actually managed to increase the amount of stuff I spend on books.

The bottom line is that… I feel like I’m treated as a respected customer. I get stuff the way I like in nice format with decent price.

That makes it easy to buy stuff from them.

There’s plenty of lessons here for other industries as well.

(Got a startup question? Ask it at AskBob and I’ll take a stab at it. And if it’s a question that other startup founders are asking, look for it as a post here.)

Andrew of CliqFlip asks:

We’re about to release and we are starting to build ‘hype’ around our product. We are using all the social media sites: http://www.Twitter.com/cliqflip http://www.youtube.com/cliqflip http://www.facebook.com/cliqflip , etc. How do we grow our user base and our following ? How do we make people intrigued?

Hey Andrew,

Looking over your pre-launch page, your YouTube video, your Twitter feed and Facebook page, in a some of ways you’re doing the right thing to gain attention and ultimately users for CliqFlip, but there’s a key, critical element missing.

Show me the Value: Go Fast and Go Long

It used to be that just by creating an app or service, you were breaking new ground and would at least get a quick look-see by people. That was so last decade. This decade, everyone’s attention funnels are overflowing with teasers and offers each and every day. The bar has been raised. Your “15 minutes of fame” is now about 15 seconds. That means you’ve got to go fast and go long when it comes to getting people’s attention.

Go Fast – Tell – or better show – people exactly what makes your app different, exciting, useful in the first few seconds they hear about it. That’s something that’s missing right now from all of your Internet surfaces. That value is “buried” a whole 32 seconds into your video: “Improve your network by building deeper, better connections.” Now that is something that got my attention! Is it “fair” that few people – especially in your target market – will give you 32 seconds to get to the point? Nope. But it is what it is. That statement needs to be headlined on your landing page, be your Twitter and Facebook profiles. Up front and center.

Go Long – You need to start building a relationship with me your future customer by creating content of value to me long before you can make a sale. That’s how mainstream commercials work – they hammer on you for years, decades, before you are actually ready to buy. But you don’t need to interrupt customers 10,000 times. In our Internet-centric world (and I say our because it’s clear that whatever CliqFlip is, it’s for people who live on the Net), Content Marketing (creating relationships with future customers by blogging and curating great information) is the way to go.

Take a good, hard look at one of the best Content Marketing practitioners out there: KISSMetrics. Again and again and again and even again they come up with content that is useful, interesting, remarkable, shareable and tweetable as far as their customers-to-be are concerned. They’ve pre-made the sale as far as I’m – and a lot of other potential customers – are concerned.

Your challenge, even while you are building CliqFlip, is to start getting great content out there that helps your customers before they become your customers. If you are building an app, start showing people your expertise, understanding, insights into the problem domain that the people you want as customers are concerned with.

It’s easier today to get the attention of literally millions of people all over the world. But keeping that attention for longer than a second means you’ve got to start delivering specific relevant value to them that second – and follow it up by giving them value before, during and after your actual product launches.

Hope this helps,
Cheers,
Bob

You’re reading AskBob: How do we grow our user base and following? from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.